A Cognitive Stylistic Analysis of Child Abuse in Toni Maguire’s Memoir Don’t Tell Mummy (2006)

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Masters’ Student, College of Language and Communication, Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport, Cairo, Egypt

2 Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics, College of Language and Communication, Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport, Cairo, Egypt,

3 Assistant Professor of English Literature, College of Language and Communication, Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport, Cairo, Egypt

Abstract

This paper underlines the cognitive stylistic (CS) analysis of one of the prominent memoirs that addresses the social issue of child abuse. The memoir under discussion is Don’t Tell Mummy (2006) written by Toni Maguire which presents vivid situations of different types of abuse that take place within the nuclear family. The observed memoir is based on a true story that the writer went through. The analysis of the memoir implies studying the contexts of abuse according to the tools of Text World Theory (TWT) and Schema Theory (ST) from a CS perspective. This paper adopts a qualitative method of analysis that focuses on two main themes of the memoir: dominant abuser and social reaction. After CS analysis of some extracts from the text, it is concluded that the abuser’s deeds depicted by various text worlds and schematic scripts are not condemned by society which leads to the continuity of the protagonist's suffering.

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